Jade Raymond (Co-Creator of Assassin’s Creed) leaves open world Star Wars title quitting EA Games

EA Motive is a game studio founded by Jade Raymond (who is one of the creators behind the successful Assassin’s Creed franchise). In what feels like a shockingly familiar tale, EA Games has lost another talented professional as Raymond leaves behind an unannounced story-focused Star Wars title and steps down from her position at EA Motive to move on towards greener pastures.

This turn of events heavily echoes the surprise shutdown of Visceral Games which saw Amy Hennig leaving EA after they cancelled a single player, story-driven Star Wars game inspired by the cancelled project Star Wars 1313 by LucasArts which mirrored the Uncharted series she was famous for helping create. Similarly, Jade Raymond had been working on a yet-to-be-announced open world, single player Star Wars title.

Being a Canadian with the net worth of approximately $2 million USD and blockbuster-studded portfolio of projects across a variety of genres (mainly specialized in open-world games), Jade Raymond is not exactly desperate for work. Her treatment by EA Games is likely a frustrating and confusing moment but will serve as little more than a hiccup among an otherwise stellar career. The fact that EA were the ones to break this news and the way their wording was formed is very telling, and suggests a greater problem with management at EA overall.

Here’s the statement released by John Reseburg, EA Communications:

“EA Studios is focused on bringing more creative new games and content to players. Laura Miele and her team have taken several steps internally to better support our game makers in this pursuit, such as expanding Samantha Ryan’s portfolio to lead additional studios, including Motive, Samantha is known for driving creative design and supporting game teams so they can bring their visions to life. She is a deeply experienced game-maker with a gameography that spans from The Sims to Batman: Arkham City to No One Lives Forever to the highly-anticipated Anthem.

With this change, Jade Raymond has decided to leave Electronic Arts. In her time with us, Jade helped to build great teams, and our projects underway at Motive and other studios continue unchanged. We’re appreciative of all of her efforts, and we wish Jade all the best as she moves on to her next adventure. We are driving greater creativity into everything we do across EA Studios, and we’ll look forward to sharing more in the months to come.”

With all of the news coming out of EA Games these days it just seems as if they will never learn their lessons, and probably never return to normal.